Search

Its time to do another DIY project in this house! Ive been meaning to do imprints of my sons hands and feet for well over a year now, and have finally completed the project! The one thing I’m sad about is that it took me so darn long to do this and the project itself literally took me all of 10 minutes to make!! After you make them you can paint them, hang them, use them outside as stepping stones, or anything you want really! Its easy, simple, and very inexpensive!
Salt Dough Recipe:1 Cup Salt
1 Cup Plain Flour
1/2 Cup of Warm WaterMix together into a large bowl and knead it until its smooth and stretchy. If it looks a little dry and crumbly, then add a tiny bit more water. If its a little sticky, then add a tiny bit more flour. (I had to add a little more water to mine). Its really that simple!! Then I divided the dough in half and rolled it into a ball in my hands, and then I flattened it out a little bit on a piece of parchment paper in a pie tin with a plastic spatula! Viola!! Press the baby feet or hands into the dough gently and then bake it for about 3-4 hours at 200 degrees. (You basically want to dry it out slowly so if you have a dehydrator then you could probably use that instead). I had to flip mine over after 3 hours to get the back of it really dry as well.

Its simple, and easy and SO quick that you’ll be upset (like me) if you wait and wait and wait to just do it! (Check out the original source below if you want a few more tips).

Well first of all, please excuse the rather crude picture above but it was the best I could do with my son running all over the house and getting into things he shouldn’t this morning!

Thats a picture of a previously, terribly stained, rubbermaid container. I should start off by telling you that this was a brand new container that I put spaghetti sauce into. You can tell by the picture that it literally ate away at the plastic! Not only that, but it stained it permanently. That part I was expecting though. I still hate looking at the stain though so I started looking around online for ideas on how to get the stain out. What I came up with worked pretty well I think (based on how badly stained it was to begin with…again, Im sorry I don’t have a “before” picture for you, but if you’ve ever stored spaghetti sauce in a rubbermaid container then you know what it looked like!)

To Clean the Container:

To begin with, rub the inside of the container with a mixture of baking soda and dawn dish soap (after you’ve run hot water in it). Scrub it well with that mixture, and then rinse it out. Next take the container outside to sit in the sun for at least an hour (I left mine outside all afternoon), and viola! The stain is almost gone after that!

Ok…we all love them right? Its a great design in my opinion! However there is one flaw if you’re in my family and use these on a daily basis. Somehow they will end up left accidentally in the car, or a workout bag, or even left at the office overnight before they come home to be cleaned and used again. This creates a problem. They can get VERY smelly and mildew extremely fast! So I’ve finally figured out a way to clean them (withOUT having sit and scrub them over and over with soap) to get the smell and mildew out!

First fill the bottle with a little bit of warm water (about 1/4 full). Then sprinkle about a teaspoon of baking soda in it. Last put another 1/4 bottles worth (or a little more) of white distilled vinegar in it, and watch it foam! Once its done foaming you can close the bottle up (though you’ll have to release the air pressure it’ll create shortly after one time). Just let it sit for a little bit, rolling the bottle over a few times as you’re able. Once thats been there for a little while just clean it as you normally would and you’re done!

I swear this totally kills the grossest of odors and kills the mildew (though you’ll still have to wipe it off but it will come off cleanly with no hassle)!

Yes! You read that right! I wanted to let you guys in on something I tried this week that I really liked! Its something so simple, yet makes such a big difference in the bathroom. I came across this website last week (see credits) and when cleaning my bathrooms this week I decided to try it. Take out your roll of toilet paper and put a few drops of your favorite scented oil into the cardboard tube. It will freshen the bathroom each time its used! My husband noticed it last night and asked me if I actually bought “scented toilet paper” and I laughed and told him I hadn’t and then I told him how I made it smell so good. I was afraid he hated it at first, but on the contrary, he actually loved it!

Or should I say “normal cleaning!” Either way you want to put it, this is one great way to clean your mattress of all the dust mites! Ill go ahead and admit that I’m not great at cleaning my mattress every time I wash my sheets, but today I thought I should do more than just vacuum the mattress. So I searched the web to find what DIY ways people like to clean and essentially get rid of dust mites, and this was by far the most used. This site (see credits below) says to put baking soda and a few drops of lavender oil into a jar and shake it up. Then they tell you to pour it slowly into a kitchen strainer as you pour it over your mattress (keeps the clumps out, and makes sure it only allows a thin coating because you don’t need much). I liked that idea a lot, but I didn’t have any lavender oil and because I’m pregnant there are a lot of scents that I just can’t stand to smell right now (and I can’t afford to alienate the one soft place I can actually rest on). So I chose to use baking soda alone, and then sprinkle some of my Purex Lavender Blossom laundry crystals on the bed as well. (If you’ll remember the last DIY post I did on making your own dry laundry soap, I recommended the same Purex product for your laundry as well…so if you have that on hand already for your laundry then its an easy substitute for the lavender oil!) It is a nice light smell that isn’t totally ground into the mattress now! You let it all sit on the mattress for at least an hour while your sheets are washing, and then simply vacuum it all up before you make your bed again!

Its super easy, not expensive, and makes you feel so much better about where you sleep at night! Try it, you’ll like it!

Does anyone else get upset when you walk down the laundry detergent aisle and see that its all gone up in price…AGAIN? Its like gasoline. Somehow it goes up even though we know that the cost to make it can’t have gone up that much. Well I’ve finally decided to stop buying mainstream laundry detergent and will now make my own! The funniest part about this post is that its SO EASY! There are a million “recipes” online about how to make it (either dry soap or liquid soap) so I decided to go for it! Here is the “recipe” I’ve come up with that I like. It adds up to be about $0.03 per load of laundry too! (Yes you really did read that right – 3 cents a load!). It cleans and disinfects clothes very well, smells like fresh lemon, and keeps clothes soft…what more do you want from a laundry detergent than that anyway?

* Optional* You can also add 3/4 Cup of Purex Lavender Laundry Crystals to the mix which runs about $3.00 a bottle. You can also feel free to add some Oxyclean to the mix as well, but I think you’ll find that the three items above really do an amazing job at cleaning even dingy whites really well.

For a small or medium load of laundry you’ll only use 1 TBSP of the powder! For a large or heavily soiled load you’ll use 2 TBSP of the powder.

You’ll notice that with the exception of the soap bar, the other items come in larger boxes which will allow you to make several batches of soap at a time. Its a total money saver too! I will typically buy laundry soap from the store that is about $9-10 for 100 loads. (Which is why it aggravated me so much – I just feel like $10 is way too much money to spend on laundry detergent when I know I used to spend more like $6 or so). So if you’ll see in the list above, I spent about $7 on those three items and with the exception of the soap bar they’ll last me a long time! I did the math and figured out that ill save triple or quadruple my money now by making my own soap!

Ever wonder how you can get your bathroom to not only look clean, but smell and BE clean?! Most people use every day sprays from the local grocery store like Lysol or Tilex to take care of the gross deed of cleaning the bathroom. I was one such person until recently. I am a self-proclaimed Pinterest junkie and after a little searching I found my way to a blog post that had a solution (no pun intended) for me! Make my own spray that can take care of EVERY surface in your bathroom and kitchen!! Extra bonuses — its VERY inexpensive, it disinfects, and even gets RID (yes you read that right) of the dreaded soap scum!! How you ask? Well with only two little ingredients! (I changed the quantity of the recipe to fit what I thought was a better solution so here is how I made it).

1. 20oz of White Distilled Vinegar (warmed in the microwave).

2. 12oz of Dawn Dish Soap

3. Put both in a spray bottle, and GO TO TOWN!

Ive never had the ability to effectively get RID of soap scum in my shower or bathtub for very long, but this is a proven way to do it!

Categories

Baby Girl Due Date

The Big DayJanuary 15th, 2013

The big day is here!

About Me

I am the mother of a cute little 1 year old boy named Graham and we will be adding a new baby girl to the family this winter. I started this blog because I felt like it was time for this newly-realized stay-at-home-mom to start making myself a blog that consists of all my favorites. Favorite meals, coupons and deals, funny moments with my babies, and lots more (as time allows). Im not sure where the blog will end up, but either way it’ll be worth it to just have that “one minute a day” to myself to preserve my sanity and blog about what I like!